Daryl & Heather Overland

Train services in the Baltic states are a bit patchy, so we weren't able to catch a fancy sleeper from Warsaw to Vilnius, so instead we spent the day cruising through the Polish and Lithuanian countryside. Another border crossing came and went without a hitch, although a fellow traveller didn't have it so lucky and ended up being told he was being sent on the next train back to Warsaw. I couldn't work out what the problem was, but I hope it was some cool interpol manhunt, rather than a simple visa misunderstanding.

Vilnius has a nice old town, and "Daryl leads a great walking tour" according to Heather's scrapbook. It has all the usual sites: churches, city gates, castles, and Frank Zappa's head on a pole. Vilnius also contains within it the very small, self-proclaimed independent republic of Uzupio. We bought groceries there.

The next day we took a day trip out to Trakai, which has a really nice, and lovingly rebuilt old castle on an island in a lake. It got me thinking, why doesn't English Heritage put some of their castles back together? Just because Cromwell blew something up 400 years ago, why does it have to stay that way? I think the Eastern Europeans do it better; if it gets blown up, burnt down, pulled apart for spare bits, or it burns down, falls over and then sinks into the swamp, put it back together; if you can't remember how it looked, take a guess. The historical buildings in this part of the world are immaculate.

From Vilnius we continued north to Riga, Latvia...

# posted by Daryl   0 comments    Post a Comment